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Some days, I wonder how many more years open source will last as a useful thing. My perception is that maintainers are aging, burdens are increasing, and liability pressures are going to show up sooner or later to put the final knife in.

In ten years, will the Linux kernel, gcc, and so on be maintained almost entirely by people paid by their employer to do so? (Maybe this is already the case.)

Janne Moren

@cks
Open source doesn't have to be unpaid work, and as you note it often isn't.

One paid source people often overlook: academia. Many researchers write code as part of their work, and policies as well as academic traditions dictate that you make it available to others. Open source pretty much started in academia after all.

@jannem As someone who works in academia (a sysadmin in a computer science department), I have to cough sadly. Most research code is not shared and also not usable, partly because it's not what graduate students and researchers are measured on and care about.

(Grad students are measured on graduating with their degree and publications, researchers on publications and grants. Polishing software for release takes away from both sides of this. It happens, but.)

@cks
I too work in academia - previously as a researcher, now in a HPC center.

You are on one hand completely correct. A lot of the stuff is unmaintained and of, um, variable quality.

On the other hand, many of the widely used software codes are developed in academia, often from grants that allow people to work on that software specifically.

Also, a lot of widely used non-academic open source software did get its start here, from people scratching their own itch.